Democrats pound McCain over '100-year' remark

By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff

Almost daily, Democrats hammer John McCain for supporting a 100-year war in Iraq, putting their spin on McCain's answer months ago to a voter in New Hampshire to draw the starkest distinction possible on one of the defining issues of this year's presidential election.

The presumptive Republican nominee says that his Democratic rivals are distorting his views. He explains that he never favored such a long war, but rather envisioned an open-ended military presence of peacekeepers, similar to US military commitments in Korea and Bosnia and even Japan and Germany.

But some academic and political analysts say McCain's argument fails to distinguish between other US occupations and an extended presence in a disputed, volatile flashpoint. One historian who opposes the war said today that the Arizona senator's analogy has no true precedent in those earlier conflicts.

"Were the US to succeed militarily in Iraq, yes, US forces will remain in Iraq for decades to come," said Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations and US history and retired Army colonel whose son, an Army soldier, was killed last year by a suicide bomb there. "My difference with McCain is I don't think we will prevail militarily in Iraq."

Bacevich, who has written or edited several books about US diplomatic and military policy, took issue with McCain's comparisons to World War II, which he called total conventional war; Korea, which he said was limited conventional war; and Bosnia, which he described as "a police action." Iraq is fundamentally different, he said.

"As devastated as Germany and Japan were in 1945, there really still was an identifiable German nation-state and an identifiable Japanese nation-state. So there was something to build upon," Bacevich said. "In Iraq, it's not even clear there is a nation-state and there's little evidence there is an effective Iraqi government. That tends to suggest a long-term presence in Iraq will not be a peacekeeping one but one in which we're engaged in a very, very long, ugly unconventional war."

McCain's 100-year remark, initially made Jan. 3 at a town hall-style meeting in Derry before the New Hampshire primary, has taken on a life of its own. Several videos of it on YouTube are circulating among antiwar and Democratic groups.

In recent days, the comment has sparked some of the campaign's most heated exchanges between McCain and Democrat Barack Obama.

While McCain and Republicans say that Obama is trying to "swindle voters" with "dishonest smears" by repeating the remark, the Illinois senator is undeterred, telling reporters today in Pennsylvania, "Senator McCain has been saying I don't understand national security, but he's the one who wants to keep tens of thousands of United States troops in Iraq for as long as 100 years."

Danny Hayes, a Syracuse University political science professor who specializes in political communication, said the Democrats' pounding on the subject could hurt McCain "to the extent that this remark or similar remarks feed into a larger picture of McCain as having a more aggressive foreign policy, or one that may tie him more closely to the Bush administration than perhaps he would like."

Hayes drew a parallel between McCain's 100-year remark and the comment that stuck to Senator John F. Kerry during his unsuccessful run as Democratic presidential nominee in 2004. Explaining in shorthand the complexities of two different versions of an appropriations bill to support the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kerry famously remarked: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

Kerry later called it "one of those inarticulate moments," but Republicans used the comment in TV ads and repeated it relentlessly through the fall campaign, cementing an image of Kerry as a flip-flopper.

Four years later, the Democrats are trying to return the favor.